


It's Always Sunny in the Zooniverse

by blackmountainbones



Category: It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, The Mighty Boosh (TV)
Genre: Alcoholism, Bringing Back the Boosh, Culture Shock, Prompt #7: Crossover/Mashup, Satire, a critique of the American immigration system and healthcare system, a love letter to two of my favorite sitcoms, and let's be honest probably the American educational system as well, canon-typical assholery, terrible idiots vs. loveable idiots, that's not how you do a quarantine, welcome to the niche corner, well this got surprisingly political
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-06-14
Updated: 2019-06-14
Packaged: 2020-04-24 03:41:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,250
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19165096
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blackmountainbones/pseuds/blackmountainbones
Summary: It's flu season, and Howard and Vince are lost in the City of Brotherly Love. Seeking shelter from the mean city streets, the two hapless Englishmen stumble upon the worst bar in Philadelphia, which is being run by a gang of five violent (and violently stupid) Americans. All is well until Howard coughs into his beer. In an attempt to do their patriotic duty and contain the flu virus from spreading, the gang quarantines English Magnum PI and his ugly wife. It backfires, as always, due to their idiocy and gross incompetence.





	It's Always Sunny in the Zooniverse

**Author's Note:**

> Big thanks to [@concupiscence66](https://archiveofourown.org/users/concupiscence66/pseuds/concupiscence66) for all her help with this fic! She did a brilliant job of helping me balance the humor from It's Always Sunny with the humor from The Mighty Boosh.
> 
> This fic contains some dialogue from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, season 9, episode 7, "The Gang Gets Quarantined".

Against his better judgement, Howard accepted the beer from the grey-faced waitress, who looked like a bird that was leaking sick out of its feathers. Naboo and Bollo should have known better than to take an international trip to Philadelphia during flu season, he thought, his throat already feeling scratchy, but the shaman and his familiar had insisted that they couldn’t miss out on harlequin fetus season at the famed Mutter Museum of medical oddities.

At least he and Vince hadn’t had to buy plane tickets, Howard mused, considering that Naboo and Bollo had graciously allowed the two human men to share their magic carpet to cross the Atlantic. He shrugged and inspected his beer for any blatant health code violations. Seeing none, he dared a sip.

“Do you think that there’s enough alcohol in beer to kill off whatever that waitress has got?” Howard wondered. It was a serious question. This bar was shite.

He wasn’t even sure how they’d found the place. Neither he nor Vince were particularly interested in medical oddities; instead, they’d decided to explore the historic city as Naboo and Bollo went about their shaman business. Somehow, the two Englishmen had gotten desperately lost, and the bar was one of the only businesses on the forlorn block where they’d found themselves.

From the outside, the bar had looked abandoned. From the inside… well. It still looked abandoned. Except there were five people inside drinking, alternating between singing complicated harmonies and yelling at each other about the recently-worsening flu epidemic. Howard liked to think he’d seen a of  mad things, but he’d never seen anything quite so mad as this. He’d raised an eyebrow at Vince as they exchanged currency for drinks, and the two men had decided to stay awhile and see what happened.

“Maybe,” Vince said, looking unconvinced as he sipped his own beer. “Hey, Howard?... You think the waitress has bird flu? Is that why she looks like that?”

Everything was fine until Howard tried to laugh but coughed instead. All five of the people at the bar turned and eyed the two Englishmen suspiciously.

Howard was uncomfortable, but he reminded himself that many Americans were simply wary of foreigners, even ones that spoke English with proper English accents. He coughed again.

The short fat one grinned. It was a terrible thing, and Howard was starting to feel very afraid. He caught Vince’s eye and nodded towards the door. They put down their drinks and turned, but before they could escape, the short, dirty looking one stood blocking the door with a filthy, bloody, spiked weapon clutched anxiously in his hand.

“I’ve found Patient Zero,” the short, fat one said authoritatively. He appeared to be the only one in this crowd with enough brains to be the leader. “We have no choice: we must quarantine the English Magnum PI and his ugly English wife. It is our duty as American citizens to take a stand against foreigners infecting our country with their exotic germs.”

Howard and Vince were stuck between the maniac at the door and the four maniacs at the bar. Each of the maniacs were clutching some primitive form of melee weapon. Howard and Vince were English, and nothing in their English upbringings had prepared them for the violence they would see in America.

“Look, Magnum,” the blond creepy man said, approaching them with something dangerous in his hand, “We don’t want a fight. We just want to quarantine you.”

Well, Vince thought, when he said it like that, it sounded almost reasonable. Especially compared to the other option, which was being beaten literally bloody in the worst bar in Philadelphia.

 

 

Howard and Vince surrendered, letting the maniacs lock them into the grotty bathroom willingly. They stand as far away from the toilets as they can manage. Vince’s nose was running, and despite the fact that there were three stalls, not one of them had toilet paper, so he was forced to wipe the snot on his sleeve.

“Well, this went all fucked, eh?” Vince asked, staring at the snot on his sleeves. He was thankful that he could not smell so well with his nose all clogged up. Judging by the looks of the place, it was sure to have been awful.

Howard coughed. “I don’t feel so good.”

Vince’s nose continued dripping snot. “Me, neither.”

“How long do you think they’re going to keep us here?” Howard asked.

Vince shrugged and sniffled. “I don’t know. Probably as long as it takes the immigration police to get here and deport us.”

“Or throw us into a prison in the middle of the desert,” Howard said and shivered. He and Vince exchanged a meaningful look. They had watched a lot of American news programmes in hotels over the course of their visit to the City of Brotherly Love, and they knew full well what the Americans liked to do with immigrants who upset them. It involved a lot of torture. America was a scary place.

“Maybe they’ll let us out when they close or something,” Vince said hopefully. “Then we can go back to the hotel.” He felt a twinge in his abdomen that was worryingly close to a cramp, and he eyed the filthy stalls cautiously. He hoped to avoid using those toilets completely.

“Vince?” Howard said.

“Yeah?”

“Do you think we’re going to die here?”

“Well,” Vince mused, “They call Philadelphia the City of Brotherly Love. They couldn’t call it that if it was full of violent wankers, right? Would be right terrible for tourism n’all."

“About that…” Howard said, but he didn’t get to finish his thought before he let out a massive sneeze.

 

 

Two hours later, the maniacs tossed the vain one, who said his name was Dennis, into the bathroom with the two hapless Brits.

“Stay far away from me, Mr and Mrs English Magnum PI. I’m not sick,” Dennis insisted. “I am a specimen of perfect health, and I intend to stay that way, although I may be forced to share my quarters with the likes of you.” His expression made it clear that he found the two Englishmen abhorrent.

Howard wanted to laugh at the pompous arsehole, but it hurt too much. His throat was not just sore--it was on fire. He was leaking a cold sweat from his pores and was pretty sure he had a fever. Standing up had become exhausting, so now he was slumped against the wall between two filthy urinals. “If you’re not sick, why did they throw you in quarantine, you berk?” Howard asked, slumping a little more against the piss-streaked wall.

“Well, I drank your leftover beer,” Dennis admitted.

“Why would you do that?” Vince asked from the stall where he was kneeling on the floor and dry-heaving into the toilet. “That is well disgusting. We feel awful. My insides are being pulled apart from both ends. I don’t want to die in the loo like Elvis, I want to live forever like Jagger.”

“It was good beer! And they were still half full. I’m not a monster--I don’t waste perfectly good alcohol.” Dennis shrugs. “Besides, it’s beer. It’s made of alcohol. Alcohol kills germs.”

Howard groaned. “I’m not so sure about that. I mean, I’ve been drinking a lot on this trip, and I feel awful right now.”

“Ew. Get away from me,” Dennis said. “I don’t need you getting me sick while I am in such peak physical health.”

Howard and Vince rolled their eyes and ignored the pompous twit by getting back to the business of being very, very sick and uncomfortable on the bathroom floor.

 

 

The next people to be tossed into quarantine were the bird girl, who said her name was Dee, and the repressed homosexual-looking one, Mac.

“If you hadn’t gotten cat food and glue for provisions, I never would have had to call for that pizza!” The bird girl pounded on the door, but it stayed stubbornly shut.

“If you never ordered the pizza, I never would have eaten it!” Mac shouted, trying to karate chop the doorknob and injuring his hand.

The bathroom door refused to unlock itself, so eventually they gave up and turned to look at the men lying on the bathroom floor.

“Alright, boners,” Dee said, staring at the three sick men lying around the bathroom and shivering uncontrollably before adding, “You all look terrible.”

“Yeah. You guys look really, really sick,” Mac said, looking very concerned.

“You’re sick too? Or are you in peak physical condition like your grey-faced friend over there?” Howard asked. He was still sitting on the floor between the urinals, his chin resting on his chest because his head was too heavy and full of snot to hold up properly.

“I’m not sick,” Dee scoffed. “Frank just threw me in here because I ordered pizza and let germs in from the outside. He thinks I’m contaminated now or something.” She pulled a face at Mac. “If _this_ idiot and Charlie had gotten _real_ food from the store instead of cat food and glue, I wouldn’t have been forced to order it in the first place.”

“Ugh,” Dennis moaned, looking greyer and more nauseated than ever. “Why are Frank and Charlie so obsessed with cat food and sniffing glue?”

“You look really sick, Dennis,” Dee said. “Are you OK?”

“Never better,” Dennis insisted, but if he was trying to reassure his friends, the effect was ruined by the fact that immediately after speaking, he retched into the lopsided sink.

Vince moaned into the toilet bowl. “Why do your friends eat cat food and sniff glue?” Talking into the toilet made his voice echo spookily.

“Their lives are terrible,” Mac said. “It’s the only way they can live with themselves.”

“Their lives must be awful.” Howard felt a pang of sympathy for the two men. His life was miserable, but at least he had never been tempted to eat cat food and sniff glue in order to deal with his problems. He tried to hold his head up but it made him dizzy, so he gave up and collapsed back onto the floor with a moan.  “Vince, remember when I was kidnapped by a hermaphrodite merperson who wanted to forcibly marry me?”

Vince groaned into the toilet. It echoed ominously against the porcelain bowl. “Yeah.”

Howard sighed. “I wish I were back in that cave. Old Gregg was completely psychotic and wanted to make me live on a diet of raw fish and Bailey’s, but it was still better than dying on the floor of this terrible bar while being quarantined by a gang of xenophobic American idiots.”

“You think that’s bad?” Vince croaked. “I watched a man made of sandpaper wank himself off while wearing my gloves and staring into my eyes, and even _that_ wasn’t as bad as being locked inside the bathroom of the worst bar in America with four violent alcoholics. I thought Bob Fossil was insane, but he must just be from Philadelphia.”  

“Seriously, dudes,” Mac said, looking down at the two British men lying on the bathroom floor and moaning, “I think we need to get you to a hospital.”

“We can’t take them to a hospital! Just look at them, they’re British. The American healthcare system will eat them alive!” Dee insisted.

“Um, I would really like to go to the hospital right now,” Vince said. His stomach was starting to act up again.

“Yeah, I don’t feel so good either,” Howard groaned.

“Listen, we’re doing this for your own good,” Mac said. “You do _not_ want to go to the hospital. This is America. The immigration police will come and get you, and you’ll still have to pay your medical bills.”

“Every immigrant in America is presumed illegal unless proven otherwise in a court of law,” Dee happily informed the two confused Englishmen.

“We have all our papers, actually,” Howard moaned from the floor between the two urinals. “We’re fully legal. Please take us to the hospital.”

“We also haven’t broken any laws. So I don’t think we have to worry about the immigration police,” Vince elaborated.

“You say you’re fully legal, but are you _really_ fully legal?” Mac asked.

“Umm, yeah?” Vince eyed the three Americans cautiously.

“Well, newsflash, asshole: we might hate a lot of kinds of immigrants here,” Dennis started.

“Like Mexicans,” Mac offered.

“Or Muslims,” Dee added.

Dennis shot them a nasty look and continued. “But the point I’m getting at is, out of all the immigrants in the world, we hate your kind the most.”

“Which kind is that?” Vince asked.

Dennis’s expression morphed into one of pure hatred. “The _English_ ,” he said menacingly, but then he had to ruin the effect by sneezing loudly.

“Wait,” Howard said, “why do you hate the English so much?”

The three Americans rolled their eyes.

“You _taxed_ us,” Mac said emphatically.

“You oppressed us more than any other country in the world,” Dee elaborated.

“Is Somalia going to tax us? Will Bolivia, or Puerto Rico tax us?” Dennis asked rhetorically. “They wouldn’t dare.”

“Isn’t Puerto Rico an American territory?” Howard asked. He had a vague recollection of learning that in the American Studies course he’d taken at uni, many, many years ago.

Mac looked at him aghast. “Listen, English Magnum PI, you’re not from around here. But for your information, Puerto Rico can’t be a part of the United States. They speak _Spanish_ there.”

“And they’re all mulatto,” Dee added.

“I don’t think you should be using that word,” Vince said primly. “It’s outdated.”

“Offensive,” Howard agreed, before going back to groaning on the floor.

“Listen,” Dee said, “that’s not the point. The point is that taxation is a threat to democracy and freedom. And England taxed America. That’s why we threw the tea in the water with the Sons of Liberty and Sam Adams and, and… the other forefathers and revolutionary… revolutionaries.”

“Yeah, I don’t know what they’re teaching you over there in England, but here in America, we don’t like being taxed. And we don’t like tea. We like beer.”

“Actually, we hate taxes and we hate tea,” Mac added. “And we also hate you. But we like Sam Adams, because he was a patriot AND and brewer.”

Vince and Howard did not argue. They laid on the floor, leaking sick, too ill to argue with the Americans about their gross misunderstanding of history.

 

 

By the time Frank tossed the small, dirty man, who everyone referred to as Charlie, into the filthy bathroom, Dee and Mac were visibly ill, while Dennis, Vince, and Howard appeared to be on the brink of death.

“What is wrong with you guys?” Charlie asked, looking wide-eyed and concerned at his friends, who were grey and sweating and miserable.

“Nothing’s wrong with me,” Dennis said, though he did not have the strength to lift his head out from where he was cradling it in his arms. “I’ve never been better.”

“Really?” Charlie asked. “You’ve never looked worse.”

“Don’t listen to him,” Mac moaned. He was vainly trying to force himself upright. “He’s got the flu.”

“We’ve all got the flu,” Dee said, hacking a wet and gruesome-sounding cough. “We’re going to die in here.”

“I don’t want to die,” Vince moaned.

“Please send our bodies back to England, where we can be buried with dignity,” Howard implored from where he was lying on the floor.

“If you die here,” Dee warned, “we’re going to have to burn your bodies in the dumpster to contain the infection.”

“I don’t wanna be cremated,” Vince whined. “I want an open casket funeral and full make-up.”

“Please don’t burn us,” Howard implored.

Their pleas fell on deaf ears.

“If you die, you are definitely getting burned,” Mac said.

“Why wait until they’re dead?” Dennis asked, his voice muffled against his arms. “We should burn them now.”

Charlie looked on the scene sympathetically. “Well, if we’re all gonna die, we might as well get drunk first.” He opened the cabinet beneath the lopsided sink and took out a beat-up looking bottle of Clorox, from which he took a generous gulp.

Vince, sick as he was, managed to look appalled. “I don’t think you should be drinking bleach. It’s not going to disinfect your insides, you know.”

Charlie took another long sip before answering. “Nah, it’s not bleach. Just grain alcohol.”

“Why are you drinking grain alcohol out of a bleach bottle?” Howard asked.

Charlie shrugged. “Just in case of emergency.”

Howard could not fathom an emergency that would require hiding grain alcohol in a bottle of bleach, but he was too sick to ask questions. Thinking too hard was making him dry heave.

The Americans passed the bottle between themselves for a while, drinking in a companionable silence for a while.

“Well, I don’t know about you guys, and I don’t know why this is happening,” Dennis said, taking another sip of the alcohol Charlie had stored in an empty jug of bleach, “but I’m starting to feel a _lot_ better.”

“You look better,” Charlie agreed. “I feel better too.”

“Yeah,” Dee said. “Me too. I feel great.”

“How is that even possible?” Mac asked. “We got better so quickly and all we've been doing is sitting around drinking grain alcohol from a jug of bleach.”

Dee startled with the realization. “Oh my God, you guys,” she said, eyes open wide. “We haven’t been drinking since Frank quarantined us.”

“So what are you saying?”  Dennis asked. “We never had the flu, just alcohol withdrawal?”

“Well, yeah,” Dee said. She looked at the two English blokes dry-heaving into the filthy urinals. “Except for English Magnum PI and his ugly wife. There’s definitely something wrong with them.”

“I think they may actually be dying,” Mac agreed. “Especially the Magnum PI one. He looks like he might already be dead.”

Howard groaned miserably. It did not exactly help prove his point, which was that he was alive.

“Don't mind him,” Vince said unhelpfully, “he usually looks like that.”

Howard flipped him the bird, and Vince responded by vomiting gloriously onto the floor.

 

 

After that, the gang decided to dump the Englishmen in front of the fish factory across the street and then call the health inspector. The health inspector shut down operations at the factory for an entire day after the two English vagrants, one looking like a jazz badger and the other like a futuristic prostitute, had been taken to the hospital via ambulance. The gang was happy about that, because it meant they could drink without being bothered by the smell of canned mackerel in the air.

As for Howard and Vince, well. They actually _did_ have the flu, some especially virulent and exotic strain of it, and the hospital locked them in isolation for two months. At the end of it, they headed back to England with a more intimate understanding of the American private health care system, and a $3 million dollar hospital bill. The whole experience really helped them to understand what had happened that terrible, terrible bar and why it was full of such terrible, terrible people.

After all, you had to be at least half mad to live in a country where you had to pay three million real American money-dollars for the privilege of being bored to death for two months in order to avoid dying of the flu or inadvertently starting an international health crisis. The cheesesteaks were a bit of alright though.

**Author's Note:**

> Like it? Hate it? Use the kudos button and the comment box below to let the muse know.
> 
> I can be found on Tumblr [@the-stoned-ranger](https://the-stoned-ranger.tumblr.com), where I frequently reblog (and occasionally create) Mighty Boosh and Always Sunny content.


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